Through the fiction of Phebe Gibbes (1764-90)
Women, alienation, and prodigality in the long eighteenth century
By Kathryn Freeman
Delivery Exc. North and South America
Delivery to North and South America
Click Here to Buy from Your Preferred BooksellerDelivery Exc. North and South America
Delivery to North and South America
Click Here to Buy from Your Preferred BooksellerBook Information
- Format: Hardcover
- Pages: 296
- Price: £85.00
- Published Date: March 2025
Description
Through the Fiction of Phebe Gibbes places this prolific, newly recovered English writer at the centre of the revolutionary period. Gibbes's novels mark the struggles of women for agency in an expanding British empire, from the Seven Years' War to revolutions in American, Haiti and France. With Gibbes as a nexus in a lineage of women writers from Aphra Behn to Jane Austen, Kathryn S. Freeman offers a valuable perspective on the 'long eighteenth century', with Gibbes' own evolution mirroring that of the larger period. The study traces the development of Gibbes' authorial voice from satire to irony through a range of female characters subverting patriarchal oppression. Freeman guides the reader through patterns of narrative voice, concerns with gender and sexuality, and elements of wordplay through detailed discussion of five novels representing Gibbes' evolving representation of a subversive female subjectivity.
Contents
Introduction
1 The Life and Adventures of Mr. Francis Clive (1764): "A marriage, where love is wanting, is only a legal prostitution."
2 The American Fugitive: or, Friendship in a Nunnery (1778, 1784): Transnationalism between the Seven Years' War and the American Revolution
3 Transnationalism in the Anglo-Indian Novels: Zoriada, or, Village Annals (1786) and Hartly House, Calcutta: A Novel of the Days of Warren Hastings (1789)
4 Elfrida; or Paternal Ambition (1786): ".fled from Arcadia, she could not fly from the apprehended disease"
Conclusion: Affect, Globalism, and Modernity from the French and Indian War to Waterloo
Bibliography
Index
Author
Kathryn S. Freeman is Professor of English at the University of Miami